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Science, Technology and Engineering

My Lords, we should be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Haskel, for initiating this debate and for his speech. In the current febrile political atmosphere, it would be especially ungracious not to acclaim the Government’s sustained support for science and to acknowledge the dynamism and commitment of the noble Lord, Lord Drayson, who fought hard for the ring-fencing of the science budget. In science, engineering and medicine, the pay-off for R&D sometimes takes decades. The tap cannot be turned off and then back on. It would be tragic if we lost the momentum developed during the past 12 years. Indeed, to retain our international competitiveness, we must raise our game. That is because the Obama Administration have given America’s scientific community a massive boost in morale and in substance. The new President has eased the ban on stem cell research and has appointed a "dream team" of science advisers. Moreover, his economic stimulus package includes new, one-off investments in federal R&D worth more than $13 billion for the NSF and NIH, and a much larger sum for R&D in energy. Our success in attracting and retaining mobile talent will be at risk unless we respond. As a scientific nation, the UK is, by many indicators, second only to the US. It is important to recognise why this is so. It is largely because of our strong research universities. We are the only country outside the US to have several in the premier league. I should at this stage declare an interest as a Cambridge professor and as president of the Royal Society, and I want to speak from these perspectives. The Royal Society aims to promote excellence in science and technology for its own sake and for enhancing human welfare. One of my predecessors, Lord Porter of Luddenham, averred that there are two kinds of science: applied and not yet applied. The most readily measurable economic benefit of academic research is direct knowledge transfer from university labs to industry. But that is only a small part of the total. Research universities fulfil other key roles that are harder to quantify. They are networked with the whole world’s research. Their graduates spread expertise throughout the private and public sectors. That is more important than direct knowledge transfer. There is a strong correlation between the research quality of a university and the strength of the commercial cluster that is attracted around it. Talent attracts talent and big companies, too. Success breeds success and, just as important, failure is accepted as a step towards later success. In places such as Cambridge, a dynamic and interactive high-tech community has developed that offers, in the words of a Financial Times article, a, ""low risk place to do high risk things"." Academics are often derided as living self-indulgently in ivory towers but I strongly contest that. Excellent universities are of immense social and economic value. The global challenges that confront us cannot be effectively tackled without the expertise in them. I am fortunate to know most of the leading UK scientists—those who have won Nobel prizes or the equivalent. They are all individualists, but there is one thing that they would all agree on: they would highlight the long-term nature of their work, the unpredictability of its outcome and the need for a supportive environment. To ensure that our universities stay internationally competitive, it is crucial that they continue to offer this environment, relative autonomy and the prospect, without undue hassle, of gaining "responsive mode" funding for the research to which they are prepared to dedicate their lives. That is a fair expectation if you are at Harvard, Stanford or Berkeley; it must be so here if we are to compete for mobile talent at the highest academic level. In research, it is the top quality that counts; there is no virtue in coming second. It is in this context that there have been concerns about some signals sent by research councils. For instance, applicants are required to state what the impact of their research will be. This cannot be more than a guess. Even the wizards of venture capital find it hard to assess the viability of a commercial proposal involving research that has already been done, so it would seem very implausible to expect applicants, or a research council official, to make such judgments before the research is done. Another concern is a possibly undue focus on so-called priority areas. Again, that might stifle the most original or cross-disciplinary work—the biggest breakthroughs are the least predictable. Indeed, it seems topsy-turvy that a Government who are rightly reluctant to pick winners in industrial policy should aspire to do that upstream, as it were, in the field of research. It is surely in our own interests to support real excellence across the board. That is affordable, even in these straitened times; I refer to funds inside the so-called ring-fence for academic research. Funds administered by the research councils and the HEFCE QE funds are the main source. When we confront more costly developments, funded outside the ring-fence, of course the UK needs to focus. Strategic criteria should certainly become priorities then, as they did in Obama’s stimulus package. We should plainly do all that we can to sustain and exploit our excellence in biotechnology. The pharmaceutical industry’s success has been grounded in the UK’s strong research base in biomedical science, which is strong because governmental support for biomedical sciences has been massively supplemented by the Wellcome Trust, the major cancer charities and, of course, the heavy R&D spend of the industry itself. But what about other sectors? A broad constituency in academia and business is now urging the need for sustained public support for the physical sciences—mathematics, all of physics, material science, chemistry and engineering—and perhaps even for a slight rebalancing of public funding to allow a catch-up by those subjects after the prioritising of medical research in recent years. The advocates for breadth in basic science include biomedical researchers themselves. Sir Paul Nurse had a fine letter to the Times urging that point, and the heads of the MRC and Wellcome Trust have spoken in similar vein. Cross-disciplinary expertise, spanning physical and biological sciences, is now at a premium. Peter Mansfield’s Nobel prize-winning work on MRI was done in Nottingham’s physics department. The exciting new field of synthetic biology involves physics and engineering, and computer science now pervades all of biology. The physical sciences in our universities are vulnerable because they cannot draw on supplementary sources of private funding that parallel the Wellcome Trust and the medical charities, or on industrial support to match that of the pharmaceutical industry. The earlier ministerial stint of the noble Lord, Lord Drayson, at the MoD, where he oversaw procurement of high-tech equipment, will have convinced him that our manufacturing sector in physics-based industry is patchy. There is a paucity of major high-tech manufacturing companies in the UK. Indeed, as the noble Lord, Lord Bhattacharyya, reminded us, the weakness of our electronics industry stems from short-sighted policies and lost opportunities in the 1970s and 1980s, from which lessons can surely be learnt. At a time when we need to rebalance our economy away from finance and towards high-tech manufacturing and services, we should invest in efforts to recover our strength in the industries based on the physical sciences. R&D on energy in particular is, worldwide, at far too low a level to meet the global challenge—anomalously low compared to the scale of medical and health R&D. Moreover, that is a strategic area where we could align with the expanding US effort to mutual benefit. Although I have just mentioned the US, we must also engage with Europe. When Europe acts together, as it does in pure science at CERN, or in the aircraft or space industry, it can match the US. There is a need for more co-operation in other areas, particularly energy and its infrastructure. Finally, I would like to engage in a bit of positive thinking, taking my cue from the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, in the previous debate. Britain has a great scientific tradition and great scientific strength today; we must build on it and aspire to be the best place in the world to do science. If we can, benign positive feedbacks come into play; the law of increasing returns applies; talent attracts talent. We do not know what will be the 21st-century counterparts of quantum theory, the double helix and the computer, or where the great innovators of the future will get their formative training and inspiration. However, one thing seems a near certainty: unless we in this country get smarter, we will get poorer. The UK’s relative standing will sink unless we keep our competitive edge as discoverers and innovators and unless some of the key creative ideas of the 21st century germinate and, even more important, are exploited here in the UK.